The Dinner Diet Dilemma | Zero Waste Toolkit | Recipe: Gazpacho
Issue No. 14
In this week’s Sunshine + Microbes, we build a zero waste toolkit, celebrate Fat Bear Week, and slurp some refreshing green gazpacho. Also this debate flared up again in the news: is red meat good for you? Is it bad for you? Does it matter!?!
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Jackie is under the weather, so Matt wrote this week’s intro from Colombia. Don’t worry Jackie still made that exquisite gazpacho recipe.
I live in a rustic pueblo in Colombia, about an hour outside of Medellín. Almost six years ago, when working in Houston, I gave up eating red meat and focused on maintaining an almost entirely plant-based diet (I still dabble in fish and cheese; not together though. ew. come on.) — and that’s not so easy in a rural places where meal options are limited like El Carmen de Viboral. Sometimes when I’m feeling lazy and particularly exhausted, I’ll settle for an avocado sprinkled with tajín for dinner or these tiny sweet bananas called murrapos, or, um, peanut M&Ms. At least, I thought, this was no less healthy than eating meat.
An adorable murrapo for scale:
Well, speak of the devil, a study came out last week claiming red meat actually isn’t that bad for you. But then a report a few days later showed the author of the red meat study had conflicts of interests including ties to a powerful food industry trade group whose members have included McDonald’s and beef producer Cargill. The reliability of the study now has some major question marks. Nevertheless, this got me thinking about why I gave up meat, and it has little to do with diet. I don’t want to contribute to the macabre factory farming practices or the major greenhouse gas releases that come with it. I’m less worried about whether eating meat will contribute to a quicker demise.
Sunshine + Microbes’ favorite doctor [editor’s note from Jackie: and thirst king] James Hamblin wrote an article called “New Nutrition Study Changes Nothing” a couple years ago, about how the media's desire for news to be new leads to them making great, big claims about studies that don’t add up. Hence, why there are always stories coming out about two cups of coffee a day being good one day, and then being bad a month later. As Hamblin concludes, basing diets off the latest trends and studies isn’t useful and probably is distracting. The right diet for most people, especially in wealthy countries where proteins and fats are plentiful, has a simple mantra:
People are complex, and the ways we perceive and communicate and relate to one another are complex. But the basic agreement on what to eat for the health of people and the planet is not: diverse, naturally high-fiber, minimally processed foods, mostly plants.
Everyone’s body is different, and people should take their own health needs into consideration when meal-planning. I still want to improve my own diet by cooking more at home and keeping more fruits and veggies in the pantry. But nutrition is just one piece to the puzzle when it comes to food choices. I’m not going to stress over whether meat is healthy (or red wine or eggs or butter or pasta). It’s for environmental reasons I’ll continue to skip Colombia’s meat-slathered bandeja paisa and choose the crispy patacones con hogao. And I won’t beat myself up either on those lazy, lazy nights when I dine on peanut M&Ms.
Saludos,
Matt
(and also love, Jackie, who admitted to eating Sour Patch kids and stale popcorn for dinner in recent weeks).
Reduce, Reuse, Replace
♼ Make your own Zero Waste Toolkit
My friend Mike Meier was recently featured on a new sustainability-focused podcast called Let’s Start Today (which you should check out!) It’s a great listen, and it closes with a super smart waste-reducing hack.
I’m pretty good about keeping waste to a minimum inside of my own home and workplace. But when I leave the house, all my do-gooderism goes out the window. Suddenly I’m drowning in plastic and paper: bags, forks, plates, cups, napkins, takeaway containers.
Farmer Mike recommends keeping a toolkit in your trunk to combat single-use paper and plastic waste. They suggest taking a tote bag and filling it with reusable essentials: cloth napkins, ceramic plates and bowls, glasses, Tupperware, silverware, and more bags.
Jackie’s own toolkit 👇
Those items can be used in a pinch when taking home leftovers from a restaurant, or making a grocery store pitstop. Store multiples of each item in the zero-waste toolkit, if you are a lackadaisical dishwasher like me.
I love simple, low-maintenance solutions like this. It can be hard to navigate a culture where waste is built into the foundations, but a little thing like a reusable stash bag can help fight the trash crisis.
Viral (Fat Bear) Tales
Meet Holly 🐻, christened the “Queen of Corpulence”, who will enjoy a healthy hibernation
For the last five years, a national park in southwestern Alaska has hosted a March Madness-style contest gloriously named Fat Bear Week.
Officials monitor the coastal brown bears at Katmai National Park as they forage and build up fat reserves in time to hibernate. Park rangers have started pitting bear vs. bear in an online contest where readers vote on the fattest bear.
The thrill of Fat Bear Week has grown in stature over the seasons. A record 187,000 people voted in last week’s contest (three times more than last year). The competition raises environmental issues too as other bear habitats break down due to human threats and endangered salmon supplies caused by warming waters. Even Alaska faced a scarily dry summer. From NPR:
Along with the novelty and fun of the event, Boak and her fellow Katmai Conservancy media ranger Brooklyn White hope it builds awareness of a natural process and the need to conserve the unique wilderness area of the Brooks River.
"Not all bears have this same kind of access to these salmon resources," White says, "and to an ecosystem that has such clean water."
So let’s celebrate the biggest ol’ bear. In the end, the jolly Holly squashed Lefty in the finals by more than 10,000 votes. She’ll reward her stout success with a long winter nap.
Fresh Links
Our favorite weekly reads about food and the environment. Give’em a click👇
👨🍳👩🍳Would you Write a Cookbook for Next to Nothing? | NY Times
The dirty secret that publishers don’t want cooks to know: Cookbooks are more popular than ever. Yet the industry is not paying unsung chefs (especially those of color) nearly enough to cover recipe-testing, buying ingredients, photography and all the other effort that goes into the endeavor. Even while the publishing house might turn a profit on a cookbook, the cooks have been lucky to break even.
🍹🇵🇷How Tiki Bars Ripped Off the Caribbean | Eater
Do you like piña coladas? Do you like getting caught in the rain? Did you know the piña colada was invented in Puerto Rico? I had no idea. The legend goes that the drink was invented by “folk hero pirate Roberto Cofresí in the early 1800s”.
“Tiki” and “Tropical” are not synonymous, yet through colonialism and cultural appropriation the history of cocktails like the piña colada have been disappeared. García Febles, a Puerto Rican-born, New York-based bartender, told Eater’s Alicia Kennedy that Tiki drinks “were made by U.S. Americans or their immigrant bartenders to sell a made-up vision of Polynesia, the Caribbean, and ‘the tropics’ to other Americans.” Now bartenders like Febles are grappling with how to present these undeniably delectable rum and fruit drinks while leaving behind the hallmarks of exoticism and fantasy getaways.
“If there was to be a tiki bar in Puerto Rico, it should reflect who we are,” [San Juan bar owner Leslie] Cofresí says. That includes, in a cheeky reversal of the cocktail genre’s usual power structure, having an illustration of “the Drowning of Diego Salcedo,” which depicts a folk story in which a Spanish colonizer is killed by the Taíno, on the wall.
🍖The Great Regression | Taste
Like the icky campaign motto “Make American Great Again”, nostalgia for the past often can mask a desire for a time where white people — specifically rich, male ones — lived comfortably in worlds that ignored the oppressive forces hurting the rest of society. In dining a similar longing for bygone eras is appearing. These comfortable and expensive safe spaces can be called euphemistically the New Nostalgia, or as writer Jon Bonne dubbed it “The Great Regression.”
...the restaurant industry has endured a reckoning in the past two years, forced to confront the Mario Batalis and Ken Friedmans of the world—revealed as serial harassers and ejected, somewhat forcibly, from their restaurant empires. It has finally started wrestling with its deep issues of inequality: a look at any recent lineup of top restaurants and chefs will show a sudden influx of women and chefs of color into the culinary conversation. In other words, if you feel the desire to play with nostalgia, you’d better be careful about how you use it.
Green Gazpacho
It’s still brutally hot here in southwest Florida. But with the start of the veggie-growing season, I can finally fight the heat with a favorite refreshing recipe — gazpacho. Gazpacho is a classy crowd-pleaser. Once comfortable with the tomato-cucumber variety, branch out! I love me a strawberry gazpacho or an almond-garlic-bread number. The world is your bowl of ice cold soup.
Ingredients
An assortment of cucumbers and tomatoes, roughly chopped (poblano and bell peppers work too); enough to fill a blender about 2/3 up
Half an onion, peeled
A few cloves of garlic, peeled
An assortment of fresh herbs of choice (cilantro, dill, mint, basil, parsley, chives, etc)
Vinegar, salt, and pepper to taste
Step-by-step
Add all the herbs and veggies to the blender. Pour in a small handful of salt and a healthy glug or two of vinegar. Blend until happy with the consistency. Taste to determine if the gazpacho is acceptably zingy. Add more vinegar, salt, and pepper as needed.
Feeling fancy? Top with chopped herbs and veggies, yogurt, and a swizzle of olive oil.
Inside Jackie’s Kitchen
We keep saying it again and again. The kids are alright.
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the current Chef-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a freelance reporter based in Colombia. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue